08/24/2008
Spanish officials said on Saturday that a woman who was injured in the Spanair plane crash in Madrid on Wednesday has died, raising the death toll to 154.
Carlos Malo, the chief doctor at La Paz hospital in Madrid, said he was "sorry to communicate" that patient Maria Luisa Estevez Gonzalez died on Saturday of "a systemic failure" at 1930 (1730GMT). "Her condition was serious, with 72% of her body surface burned", Malo said. "At this moment, the only thing we can do is support the family on their pain. We feel very sorry for Maria Luisa's death", he said.
Gonzalez was one of only 19 people who initially survived the tragedy at Madrid's Barajas airport. So far 61 bodies have been identified. Many of the rest were burned beyond recognition and forensic teams have been using DNA techniques to help identify them. Two of the remaining 18 survivors are seriously injured.
One of the survivors, critical
Officials say all 18 survivors remain hospitalized and one, a 44-year-old woman, is in a very critical condition with possibly irreversible brain damage and other injuries. She is the mother of an eight-year-old boy who also survived. Other injured passengers are showing signs of recovery, according to Aurora Fernandez, the La Paz hospital director. The co-director of the hospital, Antonio Burgueno, says Sunday that one survivor could be released soon.
Identification of bodies
So far around 61 of those who died Wednesday aboard the Spanair MD-82 bound for the Canary Islands have been identified, with authorities awaiting
results of further DNA tests on the rest.
Victim's friends and family were also concerned with the length of time taken to identify the bodies. "Right now they have just identified a child. Before then, there were only two cases of positive identification using DNA. We are very worried about that, because if it follows that rhythm, we could be here waiting for even a month", said Rodriguez.
Families traveled Saturday to a Madrid cemetery, where the scientific work is being done, to claim their loved ones and take them home. Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said he expects the identification process to conclude for the most part on Sunday.
A survivor's testimony
Palomino Riveros gave one of very few survivor accounts that have been made public, sounding tired and weak as she spoke in a telephone interview from her hospital bed. She said she had heard nothing to indicate that one of the plane's two engines exploded, as some press reports have said, quoting witnesses. The plane crashed, burned and largely disintegrated on its second takeoff attempt, after Spanair dealt with what it has called a minor problem with the temperature gauge. It was detected while the plane was taxiing, and the aircraft returned to the gate for about an hour. As the plane took off a second time down the runway, Palomino Riveros recalls it "was moving very slowly" but eventually it became airborne. "But then it made a turn, as if the wing dropped abruptly", she said. "We were still very low, very close to the ground". After the plane got a bit higher, it began to "wobble from side to side", she said, describing this as the last thing she remembers before the collision. An emergency medical worker herself, Palomino Riveros said she lost consciousness, then woke up on the ground after hearing an explosion. She was so disoriented she thought a dead man behind her was her husband. She shook him and shouted "Wake up, wake up, wake up!" before realizing it was not him. "I saw the watch was not his, nor the T-shirt", Palomino Riveros said. She recalled passengers screaming out in agony, and firefighters and rescue workers picking frantically through fiery wreckage, giving instructions and shouting when they found someone alive. "And then the wind shifted and I felt how the smoke was burning me", she said.
A combination of failures likely caused the crash, he said. Palomino Riveros said after the pilot announced the problem had been corrected, people seemed to relax, herself included. Before that, though, when she first saw the buses, she expected the plane to be evacuated. "I thought that if there was something wrong, the right thing to do is switch planes", she said. "I told my husband they should put us on another plane".
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